Here's another factor to consider for "greener" loaning.
Crop diversity: Eat it or lose it Source: BBC News
The impoverished smallhold farmers who nurture crop diversity need to sell some of their harvest to make a living, but selling can be stressful.
Villagers struggle to understand why the harvest that was so much work now fetches such a low price. The person who buys the product often gets the blame.
Researchers in Peru and Bolivia found that farmers and other people further up the food chain hardly knew each other.
But when farmers, wholesalers, even chefs and supermarket staff all sat down together they learned about each others' concerns.
Crossroad for crops
The invisible hand of the market, it seems, can favour the farmers and crop diversity. For example, heirloom potatoes are being sold to upscale Andean shoppers in smart little net bags. Because farmers can sell native spuds at a good price, they are planting more of them.
If humanity mourns the loss of wild plants, we should really worry about the extinction of cultivated ones
West Africans domesticated a native species of rice, called Oryza glaberrima, 3,500 years ago. The grain was relative of the Asian rice Oryza sativa.
Yet 450 years ago, the Asian species reached Africa and all but displaced the native rice, which had a thinner head of grain and thus brought in a smaller harvest.
By the 1990s, native African rice was reduced to a few pockets on scattered farms.
Then in the 1990s, Sierra Leonean plant breeder Monty Jones and colleagues found a way to create a fertile hybrid between African and Asian rice.
Called "Nerica" (New Rice for Africa), it could yield a bumper harvest like its Asian parent, but it was as tough as its African side, resistant to drought, pests and disease.
Scientists have bred many varieties of Nerica and farmers all over West Africa are starting to grow them.
This new rice, descended from an endangered species, is helping Africa to feed itself, yet this opportunity would have been lost if O. glaberrima had gone extinct.
As the Earth gets warmer, we will need to breed other hardy new crop varieties. Plant breeding is like playing cards: more hands are possible with a full deck.
We'll only be able to create new varieties in the future if we save the old ones we have now.
Many rare crop varieties are now grown on just a few farms, often by elderly people. The crops will be lost forever unless young people start to grow them.
So, by supporting these small, independent farmers in Bolivia, Peru and West Africa regardless of their choice of fertilizer and/or pesticide use you may very well be supporting crop diversity!
-Kerry-
